Put away your brackets, folks. The Oxford English Dictionary has declared its one word to rule them all this year, and that word is selfie, whose usage rose over 17,000% in the last year alone.

The shortlist of words it beat out includes: twerk, binge-watching, olinguito (which the OED informs me is is a small, recently discovered mammal that looks "like a cross between a teddy bear and a domestic cat"), and schmeat (a neologism made by the combination of 'synthetic' and 'meat,' which means exactly what it sounds like).

In commemoration of the event, the heroes over at the OED have dug out from deep in the archives of the internet what they say is the first evidenced usage of selfie from an internet forum all the way back in 2002. I'm going to let this particular prose poem stand on its own: "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie."

So what say you, folks? Is selfie really our best word of 2013? Or can we do a little better? Make your own nominations for the best word of 2013 in the comments now.

Image: Astronaut Aki Hoshide puts all other selfies to shame with this spacewalk selfie. Credit: NASA.